Spills into oceans, lakes and rivers from, for example, storage tank failures, ruptured vessels or vehicles, broken pipelines and offshore wells occur with alarming frequency and often cause immense damage to the ecology. The currently available equipment for dealing with spills has rarely proved adequate. The widely used containment booms are largely ineffective in confining a spill; currents as low as one mile-per hour cause the oil to pile up at the leeward end of the boom, and large quantities are forced under the skirt of the boom. When the spill is a flammable fluid, and is from a vessel, containment booms cannot be deployed around the vessel because of the fire hazard, and the spilled fluid has to be allowed to drift away from the vessel, thereby greatly increasing the difficulty of controlling and collecting it. Skimmer vessels for picking up the spilled fluid are rarely effective, especially when the spill has had time to spread.
There are two major inadequacies in presently available equipment for controlling and cleaning up spills. One is the lack of prompt availability of adequate storage units for the recovered fluid, which inevitably consists of large amounts of water mixed with the spilled fluid. For this reason extensive efforts have been made to separate the spilled fluid from the water before storing the spilled fluid, which greatly slows down the rate at which a given collection unit, such as a skimmer vessel, can operate. The second is the inability to get sufficient equipment to the site and deploy it quickly enough. Within a few hours after the spill, a slick has spread over so large an area that it is virtually impossible to confine and collect it.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,724,662 (Ortiz, Apr. 3, 1973) describes and shows equipment for capturing oil being discharged from a ruptured tanker or an underwater wellhead. The narrow mouth of a large conical bag is fitted to the vessel hull or the sea bottom at the location of the discharge. Floats support the top of the bag at the water surface. The oil collected in the bag rises to the surface and is pumped to nearby vessels by pumps carried in small boats commandeered for the purpose. The bag, pumps, hoses and other parts of the apparatus are designed to be airlifted to the spill site. The equipment of the Ortiz patent is intended to confine and collect oil leaking from a vessel or wellhead and is not suitable for collecting oil that has already escaped from the vessel or well and is floating on the water. The effectiveness of the Ortiz equipment depends almost entirely on how quickly it can be rigged and put into operation, thereby minimizing the amount of oil that escapes and forms a spreading slick on the water.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,356,086 (Oberg, Oct. 26, 1982) describes and shows apparatus for recovering oil from the surface of a body of water comprising containment booms towed by two small boats, a skimmer tank attached to the trailing ends of the booms and a tanker vessel equipped with a pump for sequentially pumping water from the bottom of the skimmer tank to draw the oil into it and pumping water into the skimmer tank to displace the oil into the tanker vessel. The equipment, particularly the storage component, is not suited to rapid deployment to a spill site, and the capacity of the equipment is relatively limited because of the dwell time for the separation process. Therefore, the rate of intake must be kept low to allow time for separation.
The apparatus of U.S. Pat. No. 4,428,319 (Henning et al., Jan. 31, 1984) uses a kit of relatively easily transported components (a skimming "sock," a separator tank, and a towable storage bag). Nonetheless, the host vessel for the kit, while it may be a work boat of general purpose use, must be located, commandeered, fitted with the equipment and sailed to the spill site. Valuable time may be lost while this occurs.